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Welcome to the QGIS User Conference (QGIS-UC) organiser Wiki.
This wiki is the single source of truth for organising, running, and maintaining a QGIS User Conference and its website.
It documents how a QGIS User Conference is organised, not just how the website works.
The goal of this wiki is to ensure that QGIS User Conferences are:
- reproducible from year to year
- independent of individual organisers
- easy to hand over to future teams
- aligned with QGIS.org governance and community practices
This wiki explains:
- how a QGIS User Conference is structured
- which roles exist and what they are responsible for
- how communication (email, programme, volunteers) is organised
- how ticketing and programme tools are used
- how the website content is managed and updated
- how to prepare, run, and archive a conference edition
It is written for:
- Conference Chairs
- Programme Chairs and programme committee members
- Finance and sponsorship leads
- Website maintainers
- Future organising teams
This wiki is not:
- a marketing website
- a guide for conference attendees
- documentation for QGIS software itself
Those topics are handled elsewhere.
The wiki is organised by topics, not by year.
Year-specific information (dates, venues, programme details, sponsors, etc.) lives in:
- the conference website repository
- Pretalx
- the year-specific inboxes
Typical usage:
- Read the overall structure
- Understand roles and responsibilities
- Reuse the documented setup
- Follow the documented workflows
- Respect naming conventions
- Avoid inventing new structures unless necessary
- Archive inboxes and tooling as documented
- Leave a clean setup for the next organisers
A QGIS User Conference is managed along a few clear axes.
- The conference is organised under QGIS.org
- Responsibility is role-based, not person-based
- Each conference edition is isolated by year
- Real inboxes handle responsibility (programme, finance, main contact)
- Google Groups handle people (programme committee, volunteers)
- Email structures are year-specific and archived after the event
- Programme management is handled in Pretalx
- Email supports Pretalx, it does not replace it
- Programme discussion and speaker communication are clearly separated
- The website is the public face of the conference
- Content is versioned and reproducible
- Year-specific content is isolated
- The structure is kept stable to ease reuse in future years
- Ticketing, programme, and website are decoupled
- Tools are replaceable as long as interfaces remain stable
- No organiser-specific tooling assumptions are made
This section documents the tools used to run a QGIS User Conference and how they are managed.
We use Tito for conference ticketing.
Tito is responsible for:
- ticket sales
- ticket types (standard, early bird, student, etc.)
- attendee data export
- refunds and ticket changes
Ticketing configuration is year-specific and managed by the organising team for that edition.
Programme submission, review, scheduling, and speaker communication are handled with Pretalx.
To add a new QGIS User Conference event in Pretalx:
- Contact the QGIS PSC
- Ask the PSC to create a new Pretalx event for the given conference year
Organisers do not create Pretalx events themselves.
Once the event exists:
- the year-specific programme inbox is configured as the Pretalx contact address
- all speaker communication flows through Pretalx and the programme inbox
Email setup, inbox structure, and Google Groups are documented separately.
See:
https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-UC-Website/wiki/Email-&-Communication-Setup
That page documents:
- which inboxes exist and why
- which addresses are used by Pretalx
- how programme committee and volunteers communicate
- how the setup is reproduced for future years
The QGIS User Conference website is managed in the QGIS-UC-Website repository.
Website structure, content organisation, and build instructions are documented in the repository README:
https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-UC-Website/blob/main/README.md
The website:
- is the public-facing source of information
- is versioned and reproducible
- is independent of ticketing and programme tooling
Each tool has a clearly defined responsibility:
- Website → public information
- Tito → ticketing
- Pretalx → programme
- Email → coordination and official communication
Tools are intentionally decoupled to allow:
- clear ownership
- future replacement
- reproducibility across conference editions
If you are organising a future QGIS User Conference:
- Do not start from scratch
- Do not copy last year blindly
- Read this wiki first
- Reuse the documented patterns
- Improve the documentation if something was unclear
This wiki exists so that every new organising team starts one step ahead, not one step behind.
If you improve a workflow, simplify a setup, discover a pitfall, change a tool or process please update the documentation so the next organisers benefit.
Welcome, and thank you for helping organise a QGIS User Conference.